As you know from last week’s post, I decided to start the VE100 Ride with bailout options. Those of you that are Twitter followers saw that I made it at least 64 miles of the possible 100 miles on Saturday. (Photo reposted below.)

My initial plan for the ride was to remain aerobic, or in Zones 1 and 2, for the first 50 miles. I was going to keep an eye on heart rate on my Garmin.

Learning #1, software updates:   I updated the Garmin software the day before the ride. I didn’t know the update would erase my settings for the display screens. I learned about the problem when the group of 12 was rolling out to begin the ride. I didn’t want to stop and mess with a computer so I decided to just ride by RPE and download heart rate data later.

At the first potential bail spot, I decided to go on because I felt pretty good. It was at this stopping point that I shared one of my tricks. Ron Kennedy had a thorn or piece of glass in his tire that he could not remove with his fingernail. I loaned him my safety pin to remove the debris and it worked like a charm.

Trick Shared: I have a safety pin attached to cuff of my cycling gloves. The pin keeps the two gloves together when not on my hands and it serves as a great tool to remove stubborn debris from bike tires.

We passed a couple more of my potential bailing points and I still felt good, so I decided to ride on. At just over 50 miles, there is a second major refueling stop. I felt reasonably good here, so I decided to go for the entire 100 miles.

At the 64 mile point, I’m packing a lot of clothes under that jacket (I swear it's not all winter fluff!) due to a 28-degree start temperature and a 57 degree finish temperature.

Bruce Runnels seems happy to be riding over a century today – 120 miles?

I did some experimenting with hydration and fueling. Hydration was primarily a formula of sodium citrate, sodium bicarbonate and some flavoring (lemon juice or Emergen-C). I did have one Coke during the ride. Fuel came from solid foods, rather than liquid. I tried this technique because of a presentation I attended by Dr. Stacy Sims at the USA Cycling Coaching Conference last fall. I’ll do a separate column or post on this issue alone at a later date.

Results:

You can see that this year’s ride was about 18 minutes slower than last year. The fastest ride time for the VE100 was 5 hours flat and we were very lucky with near constant tailwinds for the majority of the ride. We weren’t as lucky with the wind this year.

Observations:

When I downloaded the data I was surprised to see so much time in the higher heart rate zones. I had over an hour more time at Zone 3 and above this year. I suspect that due do the illness and low training in recent weeks, I drove higher heart rates but had reduced ability to turn that into speed.

Learning #2:  When I am detrained, my RPE correlation to heart rate is not as accurate as when I’m well trained.

I decided to look back at training data from the last two years. I looked at gross weekly training hours for the week of the century ride and the five weeks prior.

Here’s what I found:

As you can see from the chart, I’m down about 12.5 hours compared to last year. There’s not much anyone can do when they get sick except try to get healthy as quickly as possible.

Though I was worried the VE100 had the potential to make me sick or give me other injury issues, now that I’m out four days past the ride I can safely say that I’ve recovered well. In fact, I felt pretty good on Monday.

In the next day or so I will sit down and begin to plan training through mid-August. Looking at my current training status, I have some work to do before I’m ready to race…

Last week I saw a special report on American Airlines. The report by 9News Denver noted that American has made each one of its drink carts 12 pounds lighter. Multiply this weight savings over 19,000 carts and 600 planes, and American is saving 1.8 million gallons of fuel equating to $5 Million.

I know that weighing each passenger and their carryon baggage may bring airport delays and complaints, but what if passengers could opt-in for the weigh in? What if that opt-in could reduce your ticket price, result in a refund or perhaps reward you with some frequent flyer miles?

Would you opt for an airport weigh in if it took a bit more time, but you could be rewarded for being lighter than the “average” passenger?

With the summer race season just 8 to 10 weeks away, it seems that athletes are losing focus and trying to do too much. The easy workouts are too fast and that behavior is compromising the fast workouts. 

Are you sliding into old training patterns that are going to negatively affect your race season?

Here are the three biggest mistakes I see athletes making right now:

1. The warm spring temperatures are causing a large training load increase. The result I’m seeing is complaints of sore knees, hips and tendons.

2. Easy workouts aren’t easy. The temptation to make every workout fast or hard is too much for some people. Triathletes are compromising improvement in a weak sport because they cannot control their effort in their stronger sport(s). Cyclists are losing high-end power production because their legs are continuously tired.

3. Athletes are in the routine trap. While I do like routine, doing the same workouts for weeks on end will not bring about continuous improvement. You will reach a plateau.

How do you fix the problems?

1. Look ahead and plan your training load. It is better to go into a race slightly undertrained than to not be at the start line due to injury or illness. If you are self-coached, begin planning your workouts beginning with the week before your event and work backwards to today. You may find that you have to rework the weekly plan a few times because there isn’t enough time to do two things at once. Those things are building your current fitness level at a reasonable pace and achieving what you consider to be an optimum training load in the three weeks prior to race day.

2. Get some self-discipline. For some people, this is easier to write than to do. If you lack the discipline to go easy, you will never achieve your potential.

3. Design workouts to address your performance limiters. We all have our favorite workouts. Typically, it is the workouts we don’t enjoy that will bring the success we seek. Design your success.

With a few slight adjustments now, you still have time to experience a season that produces personal best performances.

Are you willing, and disciplined enough, to make some changes?

Will it be all bark and no bite?

In a recent column published by the Leadville Herald, “New Race Owners Discuss Plans”, it is noted:

Racers will now be lined up according to past performance, with the professional racers at the beginning and the slower, beginner racers taking up the end of the line of the mass start.

Though it sounds good on paper, rather in cyberspace, but there will need to be a way to enforce any proposed changes to the start. You see, in past years, racers were instructed to line up according to past and/or predicted performance.

Some did line up in the correct area. (“Areas” were in one-hour increments such as sub-8-hour performance, 8 to 9 hours, 9 to 10 hours, 10 to 11 hours and 11 to 12 hours.) The areas were marked by volunteers holding cardboard signs on the side of the road.

Here are some of the issues with the past attempts to corral athletes according to predicted performance seed times:

• Overestimation of ability. People with zero experience mountain bike racing believe that 100 (104 actually) miles on a mountain bike can’t be that much harder than a hilly road bike course. Particularly since the rumor is Leadville is “not technical”.
• The Hollywood effect. Some athletes are eager to say they rode on the wheel of one of the big stars of the sport. Others get a charge out of getting their photo taken while standing near some of the name-recognized racers. Still others want work to get a cameo appearance in video footage. These people line up as close as possible to the professional racers.
• Honor system is based on wishes for some. People really do want to perform at a sub-9-hour speed. They’ve trained for it and many believe they are capable. Want and wish is different than actual. Race seeding should be based on some actual performance, not a wish.
• Loosely encouraged. In the past, racers were loosely encouraged to line up according to ability. As a result, racers lined up where they pleased, based on personal justification. In some cases it happened, in others it didn’t.

What to do?

I have some thoughts:

• All racers with past race performance in the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race have established times. Use those times to establish start priority. Since some people have had mechanical issues, and last year’s time might not be the best, look at the last three to five years and allow the racer to have the best time in that period to establish start wave.
• For the qualifying races, there are probably racers that have done both races in the past. Use that data to establish a scaling factor to seed qualifying racers into Leadville waves.
• Assign each racer a color-coded and bar-coded bike plate or in the race chip. On race morning, all color-coded bar plates in the sub-8-hour corral will be the same. All color-coded plates in the 9 to 10 hour corral will be the same, etc. On race morning officials can easily see if someone is in the wrong corral.
• With today’s technology it is easy to track all athletes electronically. Do the wave start any way you please (rolling or staged 30-seconds apart), but any way you choose, it is possible to track if people are in the correct wave or not.

Lastly, if there is no way to enforce the performance-based start, there will be no changes in athlete behavior.

So what if a racer is a beginner and lines up in the 8- to 9-hour corral?

With no bite, there will only be bark.